Wednesday, January 13, 2010

After 5 years of work, I'm proud to announce Shed Skin 0.3, an experimental (but obviously restricted) Python-to-C++ compiler. Looking over the release notes, I'm convinced this must be the best release so far. I would like to thank especially Jeremie Roquet, for several major contributions to this release, and Thomas Spura, for reorganizing the codebase. Joris van Rantwijk provided the great new 'maximum weighted matching' example, and he and Mike Schrick sent in minor but useful patches.

For me, these are the highlights of the release:

- support for 'itertools', 'heapq' and 'csv', bringing the total set of (mostly) supported library modules to 20- 4 new example/test programs, bringing the total to 44 examples, at over 10,000 lines in total (sloccount)- improved type inference scalability (while greatly simplifying the code)- support for 'map', 'filter' and 'reduce' (yes, finally, go wild.. :-))- support for the 'with' statement- support for the 'key' argument to 'sorted' (and 'list.sort')- reduced the compiler core by about 100 lines (again)- a distutils-based setup.py (talk about 'finally'!)- several important optimizations (indexing, slicing, adding 1-length sequences)- an unusually large number of bug fixes

Please go ahead and try it out, and start sending in those issues. I'm also always very happy to receive new example/test programs to play with, especially if type inference fails (or doesn't terminate) for them!